A lesson to be learned from the USA army? Yes, the army!

How old do you have to be to have grown up with the internet, cell phones, text-messaging, social community sites, collaborative sites (wikis), and interactive games? As more and more of you, who have been so reared, enter the work world, the harder and harder it will be for organizations to attempt to manage you by command and control methods. That lesson came clear to the USA Army, according to Steven Mains and Laura W. Geller in their article "Freeing Ideas from Their Silos," in strategy&business' current on-line magazine (http://www.strategy-business.com/li/leadingideas/li00062)

Here's how, say authors Mains and Geller: After taking a lot of hits over the years "for impeding the ability to communicate essential knowledge quickly throughout the organization" because of military bureaucracy, the Army, in 2006, faced up to this and developed CALL: Center for Army Lessons Learned. (For all of us 9/11, Katrina, and a host of other experiences, showed us too painfully that bureaucracy impedes essential knowledge.)

CALL is a web-based collaboration system that allows instant dissemination of "bottom-up" ideas, experiences, concepts and other lessons learned from experience. According to Mains and Geller, in the first year of operation, CALL disseminated 15,000 lessons just from combat hits alone. Those resulted in "over 4,000 direct improvements in preparation and development."

Today, more than ever, collaboration is the way for any organization to function more effectively. As Mains and Geller state, "Most (organizations) are awash in insights and ideas" that need to get out of their silos and disseminated as lessons learned: the learning organization that Peter Senge called for sometime ago.

And as an advocate for democratically and collaboratively run public schools, I'm quick to say to administrators that if you think you can still manage today's teachers and kids under the old industrial/military way, then be ready for a continuing failure of your efforts to make our schools really great learning environments that work well for everyone. Take a lesson from the Army.